International coalition of Internet freedom organizations urges W3C to reject Encrypted Media Extensions, a proposal to build Digital Restrictions Management into the Web

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 -- Today a
coalition of twenty-seven organizations released a joint letter to the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web's standards-setting body,
condemning Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME is a proposal to
incorporate support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) -- the
systems used by media and technology companies to restrict watching,
sharing, recording, and transforming digital works -- into HTML, the
core language of the Web.

The coalition opposing EME includes the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
and its sister organizations FSF Europe, Latin America, and India; the
Electronic Frontier Foundation; Creative Commons; Fight for the
Future; Open Knowledge Foundation; Free Culture Foundation; April;
Open Technology Institute; and several chapters of the Pirate Party.
In the letter (full text of which is visible at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/sign-on-against-drm-in-html), these
organizations lay out their reasons for opposing EME, and encourage
principled Web users to sign Defective by Design's petition against
DRM in HTML at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5. On
May 3rd, the International Day Against DRM, the Defective by Design
campaign plans to hand-deliver 50,000 petition signatures to the W3C's
Cambridge, Massachusetts, office.

The letter argues that "DRM restricts the public's freedom, even
beyond what overzealous copyright law requires," and warns that for
the W3C, "ratifying EME would be an abdication of responsibility; it
would harm interoperability, enshrine nonfree software in W3C
standards and perpetuate oppressive business models. It would fly in
the face of the principles that the W3C cites as key to its mission
and it would cause an array of serious problems for the billions of
people who use the Web."

EME is sponsored by a handful of powerful companies who are W3C
members, like Microsoft, Google, and Netflix. These companies have
been promoting DRM both for their own reasons and as part of their
close relationships to major media companies.

In order for watching, sharing, recording, and transforming media to
be restricted, computer users must be prevented from modifying the
plug-in software used to view the media (otherwise people would modify
the software to remove the restrictions). This makes DRM by nature
incompatible with free "as in freedom" software. The letter argues
that by enshrining nonfree software in HTML itself, EME would
comparatively diminish the values of freedom, self-actualization and
decentralization so critical to the Web as we know it.

FSF executive director, John Sullivan, said, "Building DRM hooks into
HTML is another attempt by Hollywood and its friends to gain control
over our home and mobile computers in order to restrict the way we use
media on the Web. DRM turns these companies into gatekeepers capable
of filtering and controlling not just movies and music but also
educational materials -- anything digital. The FSF and its partners
won't allow these companies to sneak this change into the Web's core
language. We want the World Wide Web, not the Hollyweb."

Web expert and W3C HTML Working Group member Manu Sporny has also
warned that EME would
spur a new proliferation of incompatible proprietary browser plug-ins for
playing DRM-encumbered media, harming interoperability on the Web.
This would run counter to the W3C's stated principles, which include
an explicit commitment to "global interoperability," as part of the
Open Stand guidelines to
which W3C is a signatory.

The coalition signing the letter is an international group of free
software and Internet freedom organizations. Frédéric Couchet,
executive director of the French free software organization
April, wrote, "DRM is an outrageous threat
made by the entertainment industry against its own customers.
Accepting the EME proposal would make the W3C complicit in forcing DRM
on every computer user."

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,
located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information
about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.